Up here in Minnesota we like to think our mosquitoes are awful – or would be, if we didn’t aggressively fight them every spring. But in the face of this report on Treehugger from Melissa Breyer, I’m sort of leaning towards handing the title of fucking huge mosquitoes to North Carolina:
That mosquitoes may revel in flood-ravaged areas doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but the size and numbers currently seen in North Carolina are striking. This batch of biters is called Psorophora ciliata, or “gallinippers,” or even better yet, “shaggy-legged gallinippers” – a wonderfully Dr Seuss-y name surely at odds with the actual experience of being swarmed by a blizzard of them.
Various news reports have them at anywhere from three to twenty times larger than regular mosquitoes – and Newsweekputs the number at “billions.”
One resident said “It was like a flurry – like it was snowing mosquitos,” another said it was like “a bad science fiction movie.”
Yeow!
